Interpersonal Synchrony and Trust in Hybrid Teams

Roger T. Dean

Interpersonal Synchrony and Trust in Hybrid Teams

Author(s)	Prof. Roger T. Dean
Country	United States
Abstract	Hybrid teamwork combines face-to-face and technology-mediated collaboration, creating a work environment in which team members must maintain interpersonal connection despite unequal physical presence, varying communication channels, and discontinuous patterns of interaction. This study examines interpersonal synchrony as a potential relational mechanism through which trust may develop and remain stable in hybrid teams. Interpersonal synchrony has traditionally been studied as temporal coordination in movement, rhythm, and social interaction, with experimental research demonstrating associations with affiliation, cooperation, cohesion, and prosocial behavior. The present study extends this principle to hybrid teamwork by conceptualizing synchrony as the perceived temporal and behavioral alignment of team members across meetings, communication exchanges, task handoffs, response patterns, and coordinated work episodes. Because no original organizational dataset was supplied, a transparent simulation-based research design was employed. A reproducible synthetic dataset containing 384 hypothetical hybrid-team-member observations was generated to examine relationships among interpersonal synchrony, communication reliability, hybrid dispersion, and perceived team trust. Simulated mean trust increased from 2.69 under low synchrony to 3.30 under moderate synchrony and 3.95 under high synchrony. Multiple regression produced a positive coefficient for interpersonal synchrony (B = 0.563), a positive coefficient for communication reliability (B = 0.281), and a negative coefficient for hybrid dispersion (B = −0.127). The model explained 67.8% of simulated variance in team trust. These values are illustrative outputs rather than empirical population estimates. The theoretical interpretation is that synchrony may provide recurring behavioral evidence of responsiveness, predictability, shared attention, and mutual adjustment, thereby reducing relational uncertainty when team members alternate between physical and digital interaction. The study argues that hybrid-team trust should not be managed solely through formal monitoring or communication frequency. Organizations should also design interaction rhythms that create repeated opportunities for mutual responsiveness and coordinated participation while avoiding artificial or excessive synchronization that constrains autonomy.
Keywords	interpersonal synchrony, hybrid teams, team trust, virtual teamwork, temporal coordination, communication reliability, social affiliation, distributed collaboration
Field	Engineering
Published In	Volume 4, Issue 2, March-April 2023
Published On	2023-03-13

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American Journal of Advanced Multidisciplinary Innovation and Research

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Interpersonal Synchrony and Trust in Hybrid Teams

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